Monthly Archives: January 2019

If you refuse to watch art from people you in some way disapprove of, only Tom Hanks and Julie Andrews are left.

-– The Chair

Make me watch Forrest Gump or The Ladykillers again and I’d probably punch you in the face.

Not to mention, Hawaii and the 1980 remake of Little Miss Marker would be a very tough slog. (Note: Sorry, Jules).

And truly, if you’re going to watch some classic films why not simply go to the acknowledged mainstream top of the list choices. Perhaps Chinatown or even… ROSEMARY’S BABY?????????

What’d’ya say Mrs. Mulwray?

Uh, oh. Both films were directed by Roman Polanski and Mr. Polanski is best known these days by a new generation of filmgoers as the man who had sex with an underage girl and fled the U.S. before he could be properly punished for it.

Rightly or wrongly – and it’s not either one – this issue came up recently in a writing class when we were analyzing story elements of a classic sequence in Rosemary’s Baby where the lead character is raped by….

Well, who did it is not important for the subject of this discussion. The pertinent part was the past deeds of this director and how much his personal actions influence what a viewer now sees or can’t see in the piece of art being offered to us.

This film still kind of says it all #ugh #uncomfortable

My knee jerk reaction is that we must separate the art from the artist and realize that times change, truth reveals itself in increments and people who live in glass houses, which means ALL of us, shouldn’t throw stones.

British filmmaker Dan Reed is a respected documentarian and by all accounts the personal testimony of Jackson’s victims, their families, and the similarity and specificity of details make it as devastating to watch as the current Lifetime series Surviving R. Kelly, which centers on that singer/songwriter/producer’s longtime sexual abuse of numerous underage women.

I have not felt comfortable with Mr. Jackson’s music for DECADES given that we were close in age as I watched him parade to endless premieres and show biz photo ops in the eighties and nineties in the company of 9, 11, 13 and 15 year olds boys, sometimes two or three at a time and occasionally strangely holding hands with the odd one as he spoke of playful sleepovers at his dreamy playground of a ranch.

This picture REALLY makes me uncomfortable

I remember thinking to myself, what would someone my age conceivably EVER be doing with those boys overnight and, if it wasn’t overtly sexual, could it EVER conceivably be appropriate, even with their parents’ approval? What I concluded then and now was that it could not and, hence, I never was able to listen to or watch Mr. Jackson in the same way ever again.

I have no proof and I’m not faulting anyone who jams out to Billie Jean or who will forever see him as the King of Pop. But there was and is something so questionable in my mind about Mr. Jackson’s personal life that sucks the goodness and fun and joy out of anything I could possibly see or hear him do. Even the famed Motown anniversary moonwalk – the younger, gentler version of what he left behind – leaves me at best sad for all concerned when viewed in the context of the entirety of his life.

This brings me no joy #notaseasyas123

One teaching colleague of mine recently shared the difficulty of talking to college students about Miramax/Harvey Weinstein when recounting the history of the Hollywood independent film movement. It’s not that you don’t do it, but how do get them to appreciate what that studio accomplished without the stench? And how do you write a book about the history of television in the last century and not give The Cosby Show its due? That’s a topic someone else very close to me (Note: VERY) is dealing with at the moment.

Can we just talk about Denise Huxtable and noone else?

To say nothing of Louis CK and his recent jokes about the students of Parkland or Woody Allen movies in general. How do I look at Annie Hall these days?

As a baby boomer I can only speak to Annie Hall, one of my favorite films of all time, and confess that it will forever make me laugh because I am able to block out all reality and focus in on the joy it brought me throughout my life. Yes, I am that strong or that weak where these feelings overwhelm everything else past and present and take me back to a time when it at least FELT like we were all a lot more innocent and unsullied by the realities of a hopelessly stained contemporary world.

Of course, that is/was a fantasy in itself but at the very least it got me through my twenties and thirties. Though when you shove Manhattan in my face now and I’m forced to watch Woody with Mariel Hemingway’s 17 year-old character, (Note: As happened several months ago on cable TV) it’s cringe worthy. Meaning denial only works in certain cases and, in this case, I suddenly froze up and couldn’t help but turn away.

Can I hold on to this?

So yeah, in this light I totally get some of my students’ aversion to Rosemary’s Baby and Mr. Polanski. How many of us Jews interested in movies have ever had a tough time with academic articles fetishizing the filmmaking talent of Adolph Hitler’s favorite director, Leni Riefenstahl? (Note: Whose Triumph of the Will is coincidentally used as a bittersweet punch line in said Annie Hall)

Perhaps the answer is a film festival featuring Triumph of the Will, Rosemary’s BabyAnnie Hall and maybe…oh…Cosby in Uptown Saturday Night? We can also add in Kevin Spacey ‘s Oscar winning performance in American Beauty and two of Singer’s X-Men movies for good measure.

The audience at this film festival

But how many of us would go? Not as many as would watch any one of the six in the privacy of our own homes and keep it a secret.

Spike Lee should win the best director Oscar this year for BlacKkKlansman. The film is THAT good, THAT timely and yeah, as its producer Jason Blum said recently, it is his time.

His time means that Lee has been in the filmmaking trenches over four decades and has given us such memorable, and sometimes seminal works, as Do the Right Thing, Jungle Fever, Malcolm X and Bamboozled, as well as such prescient and under-appreciated ones as She’s Gotta Have it, School Daze, Summer of Sam, and Get on the Bus.

Icon status

Lee has done and continues to do what every artist attempts and that is to create a body of material that reflects both himself and the times he, specifically, lived in. You can look at any one of his movies and get a window into some aspect of national and/or personal history told through the vision of an African American kid from the New York boroughs with stories and messages whose truths reverberated throughout the world for nearly half a century.

That is no small feat for any director these days, but near impossible for one who is non-White. Name another.

Waiting.

Still Waiting.

Right. Well, we have nothing but time here so take another minute.

And…………

um helloooooo

Yeah.

So how is it that Spike Lee has NEVER BEEN NOMINATED for an Academy Award as best director??

Guess it must be bad luck or oversight. Okay, maybe once…or twice. But anyone who has ever been a reporter in a newsroom knows the old journalism adage: Three (or more) is a trend.

With the announcement of this week’s 2019 Academy Award nominations it is important to note that any number of films and/or filmmakers will be left off the list or rather purposely snubbed for a myriad of reasons. Taste, personal animus, overcrowding and just plain ignorance are all excuses that come to mind.

One could also question why it even matters anymore given that the Oscars are clearly the most exclusive of clubs with a rarefied membership that more and more seems to speak less and less for the general public, i.e. the zeitgeist.

The majority of Oscar voters #oldwhitemen #morethan12 #oscarssowhite

Well, in a world of lists, elections, statuses and immeasurables it is THE most famous arbiter of professional excellence calibrated by a group of peers working in an artistic field that we have. Sure there is consistent omission, bone-headed pettiness and high/low intellectual ignorance that keep the voters from truly always getting it right. But love ‘em or hate ‘em there is a reason why each year the show gets watched by more than a billion people worldwide and the honor of receiving one of those little gold (but surprisingly heavy) statues gives the winner a strange sort of immortal status of achievement.

Spike Lee recently did an NPR interview with Elvis Mitchell where he noted his students (Note: He teaches at NYU’s grad program in filmmaking) don’t seem to care about any films made prior to the last five years. He felt that it was generational and didn’t have an explanation for it, but also found that when he exposed them to work from directors like Kazan or Kurosawa they appreciated, even loved their films. It was more a general sense of intellectual non-curiosity he was lamenting and he still didn’t understand the reason, even when pressed.

Would this help?

One could surmise it has to do with how much information we must all sift through these days and time management. It also can be attributed to accessibility; meaning if you can get everything nothing is particularly urgent to experience. It’s all at most of our disposals whenever we want it so why not do anything else that takes less time and is more pleasurable in the moment.

As one of my heroes, Carrie Fisher, so aptly wrote:

Instant gratification takes too long.

Yet that was back in the 1980s, before the web and about herself and her life as a drug addict.

We miss you lady

Building on this prescient theory, it’s not too far of a stretch then to say that we have all become a nation of addicts whose drug of choice is no longer the movies but the comments on endless streams of social media platforms, television shows and perhaps blogs such as (but unlike) this one where we get to opine on everything and nothing without doing the work it takes to truly earn our opinion.

This seems more than possible because if one is always giving one’s opinion of likes and dislikes, when would one ever have the time to read or watch anything else that would allow one to be educated enough on said subject and its creators in order to truly judge the issue or thing that is being presented???

This is why so many of us are such fans of the film BlacKkKlansman and of Spike Lee in particular. Love him or hate him as a moviemaker you can never say he doesn’t study an issue, sift through numerous uncomfortable truths and then use his technical and creative expertise to form his take on what’s goin’ on.

When it comes to Mr. Lee, there seems to be no in between

Sure, it may be skewed but what he never does is waste your time on sheer nonsense or filmic masturbation that could at its best only be personally orgasmic. Every film he does is called a Spike Lee joint and the reason is simple – he wants you to get stoned on the story, subject matter and characters along with him.

This was once deemed exotic and controversial but perhaps that is no longer the case with a pot store seemingly on every other block in L.A. and soon (perhaps?) the majority of the country. But as a successful moviemaker, particularly one who is non-white, it is extremely rare.

BlacKkKlansman gives us the highly unlikely yet true story of a Black detective in the 1970s that infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan. Said detective engineered it with the help of his White counterpart yet it is the Black man who takes the lead in the narrative. But it is then Lee who imbues a rather unsavory and sadly quite timely story with equal parts humor, drama and irony. Not to get too cute about it, but the result is a REAL black comedy in every sense of the word that only someone with a very particular body of work, mined over this particular half a century, could have brought justice to.

2018’s masterpiece #imeanit

That is why Spike Lee deserves the best director Oscar for BlacKkKlansman. It is a smart, entertaining and expertly made film that speaks in particular to THIS moment in time through the lens of the past as it simultaneously teaches us all we need to know about the present.

But he also deserves it as a career award (Note: Like that doesn’t happen ever other year) and as a sentimental favorite who had been all but written off by mass contemporary audiences and too many industry decision-makers.

Finally, he deserves it for pissing us off so many times over the years as he’s done all of the above. He deserves it for that, too. Most especially.

I don’t take things at face value. Never have. One could say that makes me a cynic. But I’d say a realist. So let’s split the difference and settle on a little bit of both.

Hell of a time to be living in for us cynical realists.

There is nothing wrong with watching what’s going on in Washington, D.C. these days and feeling like a skeptic who is positive some dry ice machine hidden just beyond our collective eye-lines is creating that incessant shroud of dense black fog we all continually find ourselves trapped in.

Why, it’s like some bad John LeCarre novel that you always felt you should read but decided not to when you saw how thick it was and considered that much time might be better spent at least attempting to read Proust. Or your latest bank statement.

Just one of the many seemingly absurd Hollywood movies that seem more relevant now #KevinCostnerwasHOT #wow

Of course, there is nothing wrong with escape. Us cynical realists do it all the time. I, for one, am a sucker for cheap thrills in mindless entertainment. But cheap doesn’t mean vague and unexplained and even mindless needs to feel reasonable. Or, well, follow-able within the unreality that is being created.

Beware — minor spoilers lay ahead.

So will someone tell me: WHAT THE HELL WAS EVERYONE LOOKING AWAY FROM IN Bird Box???? And why?? Why?? Why????? Why did it make so many of them suicidal and yet others of them spiritually reborn or evil or just clever? Why Sandra Bullock and John Malkovich??? Why do you need a new kitchen or house or small plane that badly?????

And while we’re on this subject, or genre: If John Krasinski’s character cared so much about his family you’d think he’d have removed that foot long nail sticking out of the floor in A Quiet Place the first 500 times he saw it. Or at least after it almost pulverized his beloved wife the first time. Why??? Why???? Why doesn’t this bother anybody else?????

uh yeah Jim, that’s what we want to know!

But that all begs the question of how an earnest film like Boy Erased, a movie all about a gay teenager’s coming of age, can show us an early scene of him being raped and then NEVER address it again in a story that deals primarily with sexual identity and psychological well-being? Why??? Why??? Why is it okay to just IGNORE the ELEPHANT YOU PLACED IN THE GOSH DARNED NARRATIVE ROOM?????? WHY??????????????

No wonder I often spend my days feeling like Rosemary Woodhouse AFTER she’s pieced together the truth on her living room floor with Scrabble tiles while everyone else tells her that the truth really doesn’t matter at all and to simply stay in her room, turn up the air conditioning and be quiet.

How many points for COLLUSION?

Yes, there are a few spoilers here but does it seriously even matter anymore if we’ve forgiven everything else? Or at least you have?

As a writer, I don’t believe you can write (nee create) an important character and not understand their childhood, their family or their love life. And, if they’re really important, I even need to know their favorite food, color and sexual proclivities.

Call me crazy, but you can’t really get a person unless you understand whether or not they were raised by wolves (Note: Literally and/or figuratively), what they like to eat and who they choose to… well, you know… or if they simply choose NOT to with anyone.

Let’s get personal

No judgments here. Ask my writing students. In fact, I get a perverse pleasure out of watching morally questionable behavior unfold as long as it’s earned. But that’s just a start. If you’ve made this stuff up by the numbers, or use it lazily to create ridiculous choices and/or inactions, it’s no better. Either a lack of data and/or vigor means at the end of the day we (Note: Okay, I) won’t be able to feel it. All you will be giving me is incomplete or hackneyed information neatly arranged into a bunch of consecutive index cards or visual PowerPoint presentations.

This, more than anything else, is my problem with most Robert Zemeckis films. Not that anyone asked. #ForrestGump goes #BacktotheFuture3X. And #WelcometoMarwen.

Janelle, you are way too cool for Welcome to Marwen #JUSTICEforJANELLE

This could all account for why I’ve been grossly riveted to cable news and the horrific events of our current Electoral College POTUS these last few days.

Childhood: Raised in my hometown of Queens. Beat the crap out of other kids his age and younger in his youth. Expelled from high school and sent to military school. Used Dad’s $$$ to get him out of the REAL military and into IVY league higher education, during which time he was known to have never picked up a book.

What? I’m tired!

Family: Raised in my hometown of Queens (Note: Still) by extremely rich parents who marketed in racism, corruption and various other dirty deeds in order to build and keep their massive empire afloat.

Love Life: Married three times, during which there were countless affairs, various incidents of rage, violence and at least one case of alleged rape with his first wife. More incidences of sexual harassment and inappropriate manhandling of women in airplanes, parties, movie premieres and television sets than anyone can count. Or would want to.

Sexual Proclivities: I can’t even…. Stormy Daniels knows all. Though let’s give equal credence to the mysterious #PeeTape once it surfaces. Which it inevitably will.

If you say Pee Pee Tape three times, Stephen Colbert appears.

The consistent, salient details of DJT has, if nothing else, made me BELIEVE his most unlikely of stories. That is because if you simply pay attention nothing is shrouded in fog. The data continues to unfold in a consistent pattern and with the rigor of the best Shakespearean tragedies. That is where, in the final act, the main character meets his inevitable demise because of every action he took in each scene of his play.

It doesn’t take much to see it’s all very Aristotle’s Poetics.

Both storytellers and audiences should take note for future reference.

That way of thinking is SO, SO, SOOOOO 2015. If you haven’t been keeping up with the times, well, the rest of us have. So you wanted the guardrails off, well guess what?

THE GUARDRAILS ARE OFF, MOTHER F-CKERS! GET OUT OF OUR GOD D-MNED WAYS OR WE WILL CUT YOUR D—CKS OFF AND FEED THEM TO YOU FOR BREAKFAST. Yeah, you too, Ellen.

Oh it’s about to GO DOWN

Oh, and finally, guess what what? No way in the god d-mned world will I ever be marginalized, ostracized or slightly, even vaguely, smeared by writing that. Sure, this is a blog but I do have a watchful editor and as any self-respecting WOKE FEMALE in 2019, SHE (Note: My editor, yeah, she’s a GIRL) is certainly, totally on board with that…and more.

I gotchu Chairy

You can’t have it both ways, kids. All this faux outrage only works when you recognize there are standards and practices, things you can’t say or don’t say in polite company and intellectual discourse. Norms one follows and morals one adheres to that are generally accepted by the whole of society, or at least by a majority of Electoral College and/or Motion Picture Academy voters.

But when you spend two years (and in some cases, many more) either subverting or ignoring those parameters in hopes of a Supreme Court justice or two, career fame and fortune or just plain expanding your audience in hopes of world-view domination, you DO NOT GET TO COMPLAIN NOW.

I guess kudos for being consistent #ignorance

All right, sure, you get to complain. Yell and scream all you want, it’s a free country, right now. But do NOT expect it to register much. The general American zeitgeist may not be too swift on the whole but on the whole they do eventually get what’s faux and what is most certainly cadaverous outrage.

This temper tantrum you’re now having about the majority speaking up and grabbing some of the power you slyly and not so slyly stole from us in your attempts to marginalize anyone who didn’t agree with you, or worse yet, render them voiceless, these days registers as nothing more and nothing less than:

CADAVERS IN REVOLT.

You WISH you had these moves

Give me a friggin’ break, Ellen. People that don’t want Kevin Hart to host the Oscars because he made AIDS jokes in 2004 and apologized by way of saying it was a different time then, are HATERS? (Note: Your words, hon, not mine).

And seriously, Congressmen, you’re going to actually BOO Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez and no one else when she cast her vote for Nancy Pelosi to be Speaker of the House? And then say they were just playful boos? What are you, eleven? Are you playing kickball? If you have a secret crush on her, why not playfully just go up to her and punch her in the arm? Right, you can’t do that anymore in the age of #MeToo. Then just speak to her privately and tell her you like her, despite everything. No touching, though.

Oh, don’t back away from this, ELECTORAL COLLEGE POTUS and all of your minions and surrogates, one of whom is bound to be reading this. Or at least, an acquaintance of a friend who might happen to whizz by it while surfing the web at 2 a.m. in search of Chair porn.

I’d rather look at this than “The Mule” #sorrynotsorry

You know for a fact that mother f-cker is just a term you use (Note: or he if you’re a surrogate) first thing in the morning at Mar-a-Lago in reference to your illegal alien cleaning lady when she doesn’t empty the gold plated garbage can of all those tissues you used the night before in your gold glited boudoir en suite. Open concept, indeed.

Oh, do NOT start with us about mother f-cker, you MO FO. You might not have been caught on tape saying the “N” word (Note: Yet) but you have proclaimed it’s okay to grab women by their p-ssies and have been widely quoted hurling F, S and B bombs by friends, acquaintances and co-workers on an hourly basis.

I mean….

Of course, you’re also the guy who told a friend that you thought Jared was A LITTLE SWEET (Note: GAY) when your daughter Ivanka first introduced you to her future husband so you’re right, it doesn’t make you quite as homo-hating as Mr. Hart. Were it not your only offense.

#MeixcansAreRapists

#ShitHoleCountries

#GetThatSonofAB-tchOffTheField!

#GrabEmByTheP-ssy (Note: Repeated for the number of times you’ve said it and it’s been written about over the last two and a half years and we’ve had to listen to it).

So please, when asked about the new Michigan Congresswoman referring to you as a mother f-cker at a bar, do not say stuff like:

I thought it was highly disrespectful to the United States of America

You really missed your calling in standup #HILARIOUS

We’d much rather have you curse. At least that’d be honest.

For a change.

Because as former POTUS (both Electoral AND Popular Vote) Barack Obama once so eloquently stated:

We Are The Change We’ve Been Waiting For.

Know that you, as well as so many other power brokers in the mainstream (Note: Yes, we’re speaking to ALL of you), helped get us here.